EASTTOWN — Suburbanites tend to have a love-hate relationship with backyard critters. They delight in some, despise others.

Not so for Tom and Sue Ellen Kline of Berkeley Road. The Devon area couple welcomes so many beasts of land, water and air to their front, back and side yards, their one-plus acre property has become a Certified Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.

Among their regular visitors is a 4-foot-tall Great Blue Heron, who’s infamous for snatching goldfish from a neighbor’s pond when he’s not hunting frogs at the Klines.

Other guests include 25-pound snapping turtles, a 5-foot long Eastern brown rat snake, a pair of nesting red tail hawks, an array of songbirds and assorted foxes, muskrats, and woodpeckers.

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“We don’t know where they all come from,” said Tom Kline as he showed a reporter around on a recent September morning. “But there’s a whole system of streams and creeks around here. I’m sure they just migrate.”

Its bucolic setting in the middle of suburbia is what sold the Klines on the Berkeley Road property 13 years ago: the 150-year old trees, the towering evergreens, the pond, the stream, and the easy walk to Waterloo Gardens.

Sue Ellen Kline calls the wildlife habitat designation “good news” for her quickly changing Easttown neighborhood. Just a block away, developer Eli Kahn will bulldoze Waterloo Gardens to make way for an apartment complex and right down the road, upscale homebuilder Tom Bentley has carved a longstanding estate into eight one-acre lots.

The Klines are hardly unique. Their “wildlife garden” is part of a growing national movement, according to David Mizejewski, a former “Animal Planet” host and a naturalist with the National Wildlife Federation. “We’re definitely seeing an uptick in participants in the last five or 10 years as America’s green consciousness continues to grow,” said Mizejewski, in a phone interview.

The NWF has certified 95 backyards along the western Main Line and nearly 170,000 nationwide. “While some are on pieces of land and some are tiny urban lots, most are typical suburban backyards,” Mizejewski said.

To become certified, yards must have four features: food, water, cover and places for animals to raise their young.

The beauty of this concept, he says, is that it doesn’t matter where you live, how much space you have or what your budget is. For example, a simple birdbath will do as a water feature. In fact, Mizejewski contends that homeowners will probably end up spending less on yard maintenance because they’ll be designing their gardens in the looser, less formal way that nature designs ecosystems.

With less grass, “you don’t have to spend Saturdays pushing a smelly lawn mower, you can be sitting sipping lemonade watching the butterflies at the wildflowers,” he said.

If you plant local flora, fauna will follow. Another bonus of native vegetation: it’s adapted to local soil and weather conditions and thus doesn’t require much fertilizer or pest controls.

“When people read up on this, they plant some of the plants, and the next thing they know birds and butterflies are showing up,” Mizejewski said. “It’s a life-changing experience for some people; they want to do more and more. “

The Klines, for one, no longer need TV to keep them entertained. They just sit out back and watch “Wild Kingdom,” the Devon edition.

“I love the incredible beauty of nature and open space here in this part of the Main Line and I want to do my part to help,” says Sue Ellen Kline, who grew up just outside New York City. “The opportunity to live in a suburb of a major city and still see the unique diversity of wildlife every day here at our house is amazing,”